Browsing the archives for the back to school tag.

First Day Teacher Gifts

Crafty, Kids

Today is the first day of school across the LAUSD – for the homeschoolers as well! In our case, we check in with one elementary school teacher and one middle school teacher so we have the same teachers as last year! Fun! I pulled together a couple of sweet ideas I had pinned a while ago to usher in the new school year right.

A lot of homeschoolers don’t like working with their school boards, and I’m not really sure why. I love having teachers to go to with questions about the kid’s work and also being able to work closely with them in an independent study program is wonderful because we can tailor projects and activities to fit them while at the same time working in a school situation that comes with report cards and transcripts!

One of our daughters, Wee One #2 has been working hard over the last year to fast track through second and third grade. She has just a couple of months left in 3rd grade and then she’ll be able to start on 4th. Thankfully, we have the same teacher until 5th grad to help us get through the process! She’s a really sweet person and a great teacher!

She drinks coffee and we have a similar sense of humor so I thought she’d both find this gift funny and useful. It a 16oz Starbucks mug filled with Starbucks instant French Roast coffee packets. The little note is a reproduction I’ve seen all over Pinterest – a little something to get you back to the grind. That’s delicious cheese, amirite?!

The VIA packets are shorter than the cup and didn’t look very pretty at first so I turned a paper Starbucks espresso cup upside down in it and put the packets on top of that so they stuck out more. I have yet to knit with this yarn, but I used a little Biggo yarn in Dogwood Heather from Knit Picks to attach the note (which is just cut out and backed onto brown card stock).

First Day Teacher Gifts

Our oldest’s teacher has been amazing in helping us with the transition to homeschooling a middle schooler, which is an entirely different beast than homeschoooling an elementary aged child! He has the same passion for art that our son has so they hit it off right away. So much in fact, that he’s comfortable calling him if he has questions about an assignment or if he just wants to clarify something. Such a great benefit to independent study!

I hope he likes this little something, I know he likes plants and since he’s working with older kids whose attention can be even harder to hold than small children, hopefully his note will speak to him. 🙂 Teachers plant seeds of knowledge that will grow forever. I went with a cactus since it’s pretty hard to kill them and it went with the whole ‘forever’ theme!

To decorate the pot the cactus came in, I glued pages from the world’s most pathetic dictionary* (the word teach isn’t even in it) to the sides and attached his card stock-backed note with some backyard rope.

First Day Teacher Gifts

I mention that it was a terrible dictionary because the idea of ripping pages from a dictionary (or any book really) totally horrifies me. It had no words between tea and team, for example. It also had a ‘computer terminology’ page at the very back with terms like ‘USB’ and ‘internet’. My husband insisted I laminate it so he could take it to work with him because he is a hilariously ironic dude when he wants to be.

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